Life without Tony Parker

The Spurs were greeted with some classic good news/bad news upon arriving at their practice facility on Saturday for an off-day shootaround.

The good: All-Star point guard Tony Parker will play again this season.

The bad: It might not be for another month, the approximate recovery span given for the Grade 2 left ankle sprain he suffered in the second half of Friday’s rout of the Sacramento Kings.

If so, Parker will miss somewhere around 14 games, his longest absence since sitting out 16 straight games with a broken hand in 2009-10.

Soldiering on without Parker promises to be a monumental challenge. In praising his former team before their recent meeting, Brooklyn Nets head coach P.J. Carlesimo described Parker — arguably the best point guard in the NBA this season — as the one player the Spurs could ill afford to lose for a significant stretch.

They’ve at least gotten plenty of practice at playing with an incomplete roster.

Manu Ginobili, as is his wont, has missed multiple games with a variety of what Aron Baynes would call “niggles” – minor yet nagging injuries. Tim Duncan gave the Spurs a major scare recently against Washington, escaping a torn ligament when Martell Webster rolled into the side of his leg thanks only to the sturdiness of his knee brace.

The rest of the team has suffered through setbacks ranging from the tragic miscarriage of Stephen Jackson’s wife to Gary Neal’s borderline comic mishap with the zipper on his suitcase. Then there was the outright bizarre, personified by Gregg Popovich’s decision to send half his rotation home via commercial coach prior to their matchup with the defending champion Heat to draw the wrath of commissioner David Stern.

They’ve survived all that and more, relying on their depth and the vaunted Popovich Way to record the best home and overall records in the NBA.

But now comes their biggest challenge yet – playing for however long without their undisputed floor leader.

It’s a tiny sample size, but Parker’s absences over the past three years tell us that all is far from lost. The Spurs are only 7-7 when he sits during that span, but the record is skewed by no fewer than eight instances where Popovich benched him, Duncan and Ginobili en masse.

When truly injured, and Duncan and/or Ginobili were still available, the Spurs are 4-2 since 2010, and 15-7 including Parker’s absence with the broken hand.

For all Parker’s importance, the Spurs have avoided becoming overly dependent on him or any other player. He still averages just 33 minutes per game, and his 28.2 usage rate — the percentage of possessions that culminate with an individual player’s shot, free throw or turnover — is in line with those Duncan (26.9) and Ginobili (24.9), while ranking 10th in the NBA.

Healthy, to be sure, but not so much that the Spurs have no hope of surviving without him.

Indeed, their offensive efficiency in the six games he missed through injury since 2010-11 remained unchanged from the average of 110.8 points per 100 possessions in those three seasons. Overall shooting dipped every so slightly from 47.9 to 47.5 percent, while 3-point shooting dropped from 39 to 36 percent.

Moving further back to 2010, the Spurs actually improved during Parker’s 16-game absence, scoring more points per 100 possessions (108.4 to 107.2) on a better shooting percentage (48.2 to 47.3), according to NBA.com’s database.

The team has changed dramatically since then, and statistics can only tell us so much about interplay between living, breathing, sweating players — particularly when gleaned from such small sample sizes. But this is what we have, and nothing would indicate a dramatic decline is looming.

As for how the Spurs can prevent one from happening in the present, the responsibility will likely fall to some combination of Ginobili, rookie Nando De Colo and designated shooter Gary Neal, with Patty Mills and perhaps even Cory Joseph waiting in the wings.

As his career-high 15 assists against the Kings would attest, Ginobili has come light years as a playmaker since joining the Spurs, to the point he’s essentially the de facto point guard for the second unit. De Colo has started the past three games Parker has missed. And despite his recent slump and lack of pure point guard skills, Neal has earned more minutes among San Antonio’s guards besides Parker and Danny Green.

As always, attempting to predict how Popovich will proceed is an exercise in futility. But if any team can absorb such an injury, it would seem to be the Spurs.